I generally find writing a good role takes longer than doing it manually. Especially as you have to keep testing failure conditions as you think of them.

However, the point is, that once you're finished with the role, you never have to do that process again.

Not if you want to rebuild Not if you want to migrate to a new os Not if you build a second server Not if you move to a newcloud hosting provider

Porting to a new OS or after an update that changes how the software works is about as fast as doing it manually

Maybe it's only one server today, but how many times would you need to rebuild it over the running lifetime?

The killer feature is that having something like ansible lets you kill your darlings, and keep servers aa cattle, not pets.

Manual setup chops isn't a different skill here. I view ansible as a combination setup and documentation. If you're going to figure out how, why not write down how you did it? If you're going to write it down complete with code lines to run, why not script it?

Not quite, if you write the role to manage the life cycle of a bit of software then uninstall is part of that life cycle.

But I do see that investment in time looks more then just do it by hand

To be fair to Ansible, that's probably a packaging issue.

If the 1st run of an application creates a bunch of files and folders, then the packager won't know about them and Ansible's just relying on that.

But yeah, for 1 machine I'd find Ansible overkill (not a problem per se), but really helps when you have 5 Rasperry Pi Zeros scattered around the house 😉